Seahawks postgame quotes

(Opening… ) It was a most disappointing day. We didn’t play anywhere near like we had planned. It didn’t work out in really any phase, although special teams made some things happen. I thought that the running game they brought in had been the best in the league. We thought we saw some stuff that we could do, and boy we couldn’t handle it. They ran the ball beautifully today. Jamaal had a huge day.

It gave Matt Cassel time to do his thing, too. He had a great day today. We couldn’t rattle him on third down, we couldn’t get to him enough. They nailed us on third down conversions, which is really an Achilles heel for us in games we don’t play well. They started out 6 out of 8 in the first half, or something like that, and it carries on. It was a very difficult day for us; coming back home, starting this push for the end of the season, and to play like that, it’s disturbing. I told these guys I’m trying to not make any assessments right now, not to figure it out in the locker room.

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We have to come back to work tomorrow and get after the film and get going, and get our stuff right. We need to get a new start. This start isn’t the one we wanted, so we’re going to start it again next week and see if we can get going. We made it out of here okay, health-wise. A couple of guys banged, but it doesn’t look like too many serious things. I really want to see us play so much better when we play here for our fans. It was a bad day for us out there, for the showing, and the fans ready to crank it up and get going and we played like garbage out there. That’s what it is.

(On whether the long 15-play drive sapped Seattle’s offensive momentum …) I don’t know, the time of possession was ridiculous, I think it was 40 minutes or something, but that goes back to third downs on both sides. We were 1 for 4 in the first half, and we didn’t find anything out in the first half at all that we needed to, because we didn’t convert and we couldn’t get off the field on defense. It zapped the defense, too. They did a great job of moving the ball and taking control of it, and they controlled the football game.

(On the play of the defense…) We were not where we needed to be on the defensive side. We got knocked around, they rushed for a ton of yards. They’ve had 3 or 4 games like this, where’ they’ve hit it for 250 or something like that, and they wear people out, and they had that day again. I hate to think that we weren’t able to stop it, because we knew that they had it, and we couldn’t get enough push at the line of scrimmage and we didn’t tackle as well as we needed to. Jamaal ran all over the place on us. Cassel ran the ball well too, he got out on a couple of scrambles, to add to it.

(On the absence of Mike Williams…) He worked out in pregame, and he ran but he couldn’t cut. We would think that he has a real good chance to get back this week, but it has to be a pretty good 3 days around here; Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, we need to make sure he makes some strides, or it will be hard for him to go a couple of weeks without playing, and then try to play on gameday. We’ll see. He was good enough to run, but not good enough to play. He couldn’t help us out.

(On the offense…) I was disappointed; we dropped a couple of balls. We kind of had a little smoothing going there, with the big play to Ben, and we stopped them and we come back out, and then we hurt our momentum not converting on a couple of completions there.

(On the impact of Mike Williams not playing…) We planned that he wouldn’t be there. But, Mike has been a big factor for us, and he’s helped Matt out immensely, and made a bunch of third down catches with guys hanging all over him that have been huge in the offensive production in the last few weeks, and we didn’t have that. That’s how it goes. You have to go with the guys that you have, and you have to make stuff happen, which we weren’t able to do.

(On starting the second half strong…) We came right out and jumped on it in the third quarter, and the next thing Matt hits the big play and away we go, and we start to feel like we can move the football and throw it around, and we need everybody. We need everybody that’s available. We need all hands on deck. This is a tremendous challenge every week; it’s hard to go without guys, but everybody has to face it and do it. We didn’t overcome it, at least early on, and we didn’t get the production that we wanted.

Matt made some completions and made some yards in the second half, but in the first half we never even got started.

(On the defense…) We’re struggling. We’ve not been able to stop the running game right now, and everything starts there. We haven’t really regained the play at the line of scrimmage that we had about a month ago. We just have to keep working; we don’t have any other choice but to keep working at it, scheme wise, and do things to help our guys, and they got knocked around today.

(On the impact of the stretch play to Jamaal Charles…) They’re a very fast team. He makes them a very fast team. They didn’t have McCluster, which also adds to their style today. He’s a very dangerous player, he just runs around you. He’s done it to everybody in the league, all season long. He just runs around the defense. We tried hard to keep the edges; you saw us string things to the sidelines, and knock things out of bounds like we wanted to, but not enough time. If you make a mistake and duck your head inside, he got around the edge and turned it up field. That is kind of their bread and butter, and they feed off of that, and their play passes come off of that. But it’s really just about dealing with the speed, and they’re a nice club blocking. They do a nice job on the edge, the tight ends did a nice job, the tackles had a good day against us too. Unfortunately I have to tell you that; I wish it wasn’t so.

(On the injury to Chris Spencer…) He got leg whipped. I’m not very familiar with how to finish games like this, and we would have done it better.

(On other injuries…) Tru came back and played all right. I think Hawthorne has a little something they have to take a look at, a chest bruise. Not too much other stuff. It looks like we came out okay.

(On what the team learned from the loss….) That we don’t ever want to come into this stadium and perform like that and let people knock us around like that. Basically, that we would make the assessments tomorrow and talk about it, and try to talk about it, and not try to figure it all out when you’re hurting and you feel like garbage. We need to step back and take a look at it and assess it properly and make sure that we say all the right things that are meaningful and on the mark. I told them to be quiet and we’ll figure it out, because they don’t have any better ideas than I do about it right no.

So, let’s just be quiet, get together tomorrow and figure it out and then we’ll know where we go from there.

(On whether he considered challenging the Cameron Morrah play down the sidelines…) Yes, we were all over that one. The guys upstairs said that they could see that they weren’t going to give us that. They felt like we would not get that overturned.

(On the play of the special teams…) You could see the respect that they paid us in turns of kicking the ball to us. They tried to play keep away with it. On the other side, we had a big, big block, perfectly orchestrated [punt] block. The field goal, we have been looking for that field goal block all year, our guys have been busting their tails to get one, it’s a huge play, and we almost had a chance to scoop that one up, too. So, again, our guys really have done a nice job, and in this game, they gave us a chance to hang. Those are two huge plays, that usually win you a football game. Not today.

(On the turnovers, was it needing to get big plays…) I think the one he threw down the middle was a little desperate. That was not the ball that he would normally throw in that situation. It was a nice play by the DB undercutting the route on the sidelines. They were close on a couple other ones, too. He was working hard to try and make something happen, more than we like him to have to play. It’s a style that we don’t want. The game kind of called for him to try to do some things. He was just battling.

(On the fourth down conversion attempt early in the game…) I didn’t feel like we got the right information about the third down play, and we didn’t get the ball snapped early. We felt like they knocked us back, and so the plays that we wanted to run up the middle, we just got away from that. We knew we had a good matchup. It was something that we had planned on trying, but I didn’t like the way it felt. I wish to see us hammering that thing and knock it out like we did later on on the third and one, but that’s how it goes.

(On the lack of a running game…) We want to be a balanced offense, but we’re not there, though. We’re not able to do that yet. That’s what we’re always striving for. When you’re a championship club, you know how to run the ball as well as throw the football. That’s what we’ll always be working toward, but we have to try to win the games right now and do what we can with what we have. There’s not as much emphasis to create that balance, we just have to try to find it. Hopefully, when you get going in the game, and you get out ahead, you go back to the Arizona game when you’re on the other end of the score, then you have the chance to run the football more, and you have a chance to get a little feel and get a little sense of a mix, but it didn’t happen in the first half, and then I said, Jeremy, let’s throw the heck out of it in the second half. Let’s see if we can get back in this thing. We have moved the ball for 3 weeks in a row throwing the football, and Matt’s played well, the protection has been pretty good, and it’s given us a chance. We needed our guys to make big plays. Ben has done a great job, we needed a little bit more out of the rest of them. Stokley had a good game today, he came through a number of times, and made some nice plays, but you can feel that we miss the consistency of throwing to Mike today. That wasn’t there that we’ve seen the last couple of weeks. Maybe we have to adapt, but that wasn’t in existence, and it had been something we had been feeding off of the last couple of weeks.

QB MATT HASSELBECK

(On what the coach said after the game…) He basically said hey, I don’t have the answers, it’s tough to dissect this one right now, let’s watch the film tomorrow before I make any specific observations. I think there are some things that stand out to everybody, but his advice was basically to shut up and watch the film and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. We’ll tell the troops tomorrow and see what our real issues are.

(On the play of the offense…) It was not good, it was not good enough. We didn’t really accomplish any of the goals that we set out to do before the game. We knew how they would play us for the most part, we had some ideas of what we could do against them, running the ball, throwing the ball and we were pretty unsuccessful at almost all of those things. We did have some opportunities that we took advantage of, but for the most part we were very disappointed.

(On the importance of the running game…) Running the ball is super important; it’s incredibly important. Even the last two weeks we’ve had some yards throwing the ball, but if we are going to accomplish our goals late in the year, we have to run the ball. That’s something that has definitely been a point of emphasis, we’re definitely talking about it, we’re definitely trying to get that done. I think if we just do better as we start the games, if we’re not behind, we can kind of stick to that. I think we have the people to do it, in terms of the running backs we for sure do. I don’t have any answers, but obviously the more complete we can be offensively, the better.

(On whether the losses worry him…) I’m not worried about that at all, but we need to win at home. There’s just no excuse. That’s something we always do, we’ve always taken pride in that, and we’re losing hold of that part of it. We need to get that back.

(On missing Mike Williams…) That was big. That was really big. He’s big, and it was big. Everyone else has to step their game up a little bit, and who we are offensively has a lot to do with the kind of player that he is on that weakside wide receiver position. He’s a big, strong, physical guy and he’s not necessarily the fastest guy, but he’s real big, real sure-handed, those kind of things. He has a good feel for what we’re doing offensively. When he’s not there, we have to come up with a solution.

(On whether he was keeping an eye out for whether Williams could play…) Early in the week, I was planning on not having him. I talked to him Friday; I saw him Saturday night walking around the hotel, I really thought there was a real chance. I kind of expected, I probably shouldn’t have let my mind go there, but I expected him a little bit. I saw him go out there for the warm-up. But, that’s a good lesson. You really have to focus on what you can control, and not get caught up in the other stuff.

(On the fourth and one play…) It was a call, it was an aggressive call. We had seen another team run a similar play and hit it, and we thought that hey, we want to be aggressive this game, that was one of the things that we wanted to do; we wanted to take advantage of our matchups outside with their corners.

So, it was an aggressive call. We had hit them all week in practice; I don’t think the ball has hit the ground one time in practice on our deep balls. It was just too bad that we didn’t connect.

(On the difficulty in the first half offensively, and what was discussed at halftime…) We really didn’t have that many plays. There wasn’t anything we had to chance, necessarily, as much as we just talked about trying to get to our stuff that we wanted to get to in the first quarter. There were a couple of changes, I think the first change was that we needed a game-changer, we need to take a shot, so the first play we called it was just a regular play, but there was a chance to take a shot to Obo if we wanted to and I liked it and we took a shot and he made a nice catch. There was an opportunity for being aggressive still, like we talked about last night. But, it wasn’t like we had any major things to do, we just hadn’t run a lot of plays.

(On some timing issues on the shorter route…) I think they started sitting a little bit. The 2-man gave us a little bit of an issue today, they were playing a hard inside technique; grabbing with help over the top and we didn’t handle it as well as we are capable of handling it.

(On the play of Ben Obomanu…) I would not say I’m surprised, but he’s been here a long time, just kind of in the shadows. He’s real quiet, so he just does exactly what he’s told; he’s just real consistent, real solid. When he came back this year, I thought he was catching the ball better, I told him that. He bought a JUGS machine in the offseason, and he’s been using that. He started to look more confident and more natural catching the ball. He’s just kind of been the guy that’s been real consistent. Our coaches at one point said, hey, we’re just looking for guys that can be consistent, guys we can count on, and he’s our guy. He’s been consistent and we’ve given him opportunities like we’ve talked about, and he’s taken advantage of them, so we’re giving him more. That first catch that he had on the deep ball to start the second half, he caught it, and we said you know what; let’s get a new formation, let’s run that exact same route on the other side, and he caught it for a touch. It really is true, if you step up and make plays, they’re going to find ways to give you more opportunities and make more.

(On the difficulty of working with an O-line that changes so frequently…) I think you just have to trust it. It’s been a challenge, but it’s probably harder on those guys than it is on me. We just have to figure out ways to stay healthy, take care of our bodies and if we do get adversity like that, we have to handle it. We lost Spencer at the end for some plays, and it’s just tough. We’re getting down to where we’re too hurt. We have to get healthy.

(On whether he felt they could still rally in the second half…) Yes, even though it probably didn’t feel like it in the stadium, we weren’t far away. We were in a situation where we were going to go for three if we could get three, and then you’re one score away with a two point conversion. Down 11 is a great place to be; you’re in position to get right back in it. The game is not decided at all, down 11. It got a little bit out of control after that, but we were right there. We just have to play a lot better.

(On the big difference in rushing yards…) We talk about it on the sidelines, what runs we’re going to go to, what runs we like, or hey, we’re going to just throw it; those kinds of things. We’re going to try to go Two Minute, even though it’s not two minutes to go. We talk about those things, but it’s one of those things where you have to be on the field and you have to sustain drives, and it’s a two-way street with our defense and with us. When we’re on the field we have to stay on the field, and when they’re out there, they have to do what they can to get off. Third Down Conversions played a big part in that, and being down, we probably contributed to our issues running the ball.

WR BEN OBOMANU

(On the route on his touchdown reception) “Yeah, it was a double-move. Kind of like a corner and go. It was one of those things where you want to get close to him and whether he goes outside and jumps it or not, it’s one of those where if you get passed him, the quarterback can give you a chance to make a play. So I happened to get passed him and make a play.”

(On if he knew he was so wide open) “I kind of did. When he bit, I actually had to throw him by a bit. So I knew I had him turned around so even if he was in position, he wasn’t going to be able to find the ball so it was just a matter of catching the ball.”

(On the other long reception he had) “It was actually the same route. Different coverages both times though. Yeah, same route on two different coverages.”

RB JUSTIN FORSETT

(On what they can do to be better) “Just keep going, working hard in practice and moving forward. Don’t look back in the past, learn from this game and just keep moving forward.”

(On having nine different offensive line combinations this year and how that affects continuity and performance) “I think we do a good job of bringing in guys that can fit into the system – smart guys that pick up the system well. It would be good to have some real chemistry with guys for awhile but this is the National Football League, things happen and people adjust and it’s just something that we have to continue to work on.”

(On what’s happened since the game in Chicago when it seemed everything was clicking) “We just got to execute. Like that game we were able to execute, move the ball, and that consistency is what we need, especially in November and December. We’ve got to have that consistency and we haven’t had it.”

DT CRAIG TERRILL

(On his blocked field goal) “(We got good penetration) and I got up between the guard and the tackle and was able to get a hand up on it.”

(On Kentwan Balmer having his hand up high next to Terrill’s) “Yeah, I think he got a piece of it after I hit it. I wish we could have picked it up and made something happen with it but that’s the way it goes.”

(On how he blocks field goals so often) “I just think it’s a cool play that a lot of guys kind of take off but you can make such a momentum shift if you can take points off the board and it puts our offense out there in a good spot. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing in college and since I’ve been here.”

(On having big plays on special teams but not enough for the win) “For sure, and we had a lot of great momentum right then and we had the blocked punt and the touchdown and that was huge. It’s just something that it doesn’t matter what you do in the first half; you’ve got to carry your momentum through the game to finish like that (with a win).”

S EARL THOMAS

(On the blocked field goal he recovered and scored on) “Well, we got a good block and I was able to scoop it up and score. I was just thinking about scooping and scoring the whole time. We worked hard on that in practice. It was actually called a hook-horn so they put it in just for me to rush off the edge.We thought I was going to go free (but) instead the inside guy (Kennard Cox) came free and I was able to pick it up.”

(On not thinking his first NFL touchdown would come on a blocked field goal) “No, but I’ll take it.”

(On the defense giving up over 500 yards total offense and how tough it was today) “It was very tough. They were moving the ball. Their running game was great today and it opened up the passing game. I got to look at film. I really can’t tell you (what was wrong) right now. We’ve got film tomorrow and we’ll find out what happened tomorrow.”

(On the Chiefs having a good amount of offensive targets) “Oh yeah, they have a lot of go-to guys. Their running backs are great and also eighty-two (Dwayne Bowe) played good. We didn’t get it done today.”

CB KELLY JENNINGS

(On if the Chiefs offense did anything that surprised the Seahawks) “No, I mean, they did what we saw on film. We just didn’t do what we needed to do to get a stop. That’s about it.”

(On Jamaal Charles) “He’s quick, he’s fast, and it’s just something that you have to be aware of. Any back that has that type of qualities, there’s certain ways you have to contain him. He did some great things leaking out, getting out on us and we got to go see film to see what happened.”

CB KENNARD COX

(On the punt that he blocked) “We just came out (thinking) whoever gets there first, make a play. We’ve seen a couple things on tape that they showed (vulnerability) and we just took advantage of it.”

(On if he was surprised to be that free for the block) “No, because in practice I wasn’t surprised. Whatever you practice like during the week, that’s the way it’s going to come out on Sunday every time.”

(On what he was thinking once he got past the blockers) “Just, ‘Make it happen.’ Because a lot of people choke up – a lot of people get too surprised. But you know, it was just repetition in my head. I think about certain plays that could go on for me before the game so I just try to take advantage of that.”

(On practicing the block during the week) “Yeah, we timed it up all week. Coach talked about it and that’s what happened.”

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